Category Archives: Foreign Service Stuff

When I last left you we had arrived at Lake Louise. The lake is glacier fed, and as you can see from this panorama I took, is an odd shade of blue-green. This is due to the suspended rock dust scraped off by the glacier on its trip down to the lake. Although I didn’t take the time to do so, the boats and canoes you can rent over to the left side of the lake look like fun. Over to the right, you can see the lodge right by the lake.

I posted this one before, but I have to tell the story. I’m not a photographer, but I’ve learned a few tricks to make photos interesting. One is to put something in the foreground, like an overhanging branch from a tree. Another is to choose an unusual angle. Put the two together and you get this photo.

To get the rocks into the foreground required me to lie flat on my stomach on the path. This is not the first time I’ve used this angle in a photo, and it always seems to make other tourists laugh…or wonder if I’m injured. For example, here’s where I used it in Shanghai.

Half a dozen young, Chinese students came over to offer to help me up :).

After the lake, I continued up the highway to see some more glaciers. For example, there’s this one, which looks like a claw, even though the bottom talon has just about melted away with climate change.

Continue a while longer and you’ll come to Bow Lake and its associated Glacier.

Then you notice the sun is starting to go down, and there isn’t a gas station within 80 miles and you’re below a quarter tank, so you turn around.

Maybe it’s Canada. maybe it’s the remote west, but there isn’t a gas station at every overpass coming back from the mountains into Calgary. In fact, I was getting buzzes and beeps and blinking gas pumps on my dashboard when I was finally able to pull into one, but I did manage to escape the embarrassment of running out of gas on a remote Canadian highway.

There was supposed to be more of this – more pictures, different parts of Calgary, but I came down with an unexpected chest cold my last day at work there and couldn’t get out of bed the following Saturday I had set aside for more tourism. I guess I’ll have to go back. For one thing, I want to ride the bobsled and the ziplines.

Canada’s a big place, and up until now, I’d only been in a very small part of it. In my life, I’ve never been west (in Canada) of Toronto, which is pretty far east. So, when I had the opportunity to spend a week’s TDY in Calgary, I jumped at it.

Calgary, like Denver, sits just to the east of the Rocky Mountains (a little further away, as I learned on my drive to the mountains, but certainly in the vicinity.) It was home of the 1988 Winter Olympics (more on that later) and for the past 100 years, of the Calgary Stampede, which had the bad taste to end just before I got there. Like Denver, it’s at altitude. Calgary is the kilometer-high city (actually a bit over a kilometer) and the altitude and normal dryness of the air results in a climate which even when warm in the daytime, cools significantly at night.

Arriving Saturday around lunchtime, I proceeded to get lost at least three, maybe four (depending on how you count) times on my way to my home away from home. That was with Google Maps directions. I finally headed dead reckoning for the general vicinity of where I knew the house was, hoping to find a familiar sounding street. That worked, although I took a few laps around the block to find the house kinda hidden behind some hedges. Calgary, in spite of downtown being a conventional grid, seems determined to make sure it’s hard to get to there from here, using a combination of having both numbered streets and avenues, random one way streets, places where the grid ends, light rail only roads and construction to keep you paying attention.

Sunday, I headed out at 0 dark 30 (two hours time change, remember, so I was awake anyway) for the mountains. What was my plan? Drive west until I found them! The way to do that is on the Trans-Canada, and I had seen the exit for it on my way from the Airport. When I took the exit from the highway, I was suprised to find that, at least in this section, the Trans-Canada was more Route 66 than I-66. In other words – it was a regular surface road with traffic lights, railroad crossings and such instead of the expected limited access highway. Eventually it cleared Calgary and became what I had expected for the most part, divided highway headed West. Just about the time that happens, appearing to your left at the top of a hill is what, after a few seconds, you realize are the ski jumping towers from 1988 (also the bobsled, luge and ice arenas, but it takes a while longer to realize that.)

It’s about now you really begin to sense the mountains coming up, and notice a few things:

They are very steep, more so than the ones in Colorado

They are very “Rocky”, grey stone from about a third of the way up to the tip. It really jumps out at you, even at a distance.

Just keep driving, and eventually you come to the last stop before entering the National Park…Canmore. I didn’t stop there because which exit to take wasn’t obvious from the Trans-Canada and it was still very early in the morning, and all I really needed was batteries for the camera. A few miles up the road, and you enter Banff National Park. Like in the U.S., you pay for access to the National Parks these days. They’re worth it, but you shouldn’t have to pay for things like National Parks, Interstate Highways and other federal institutions you have already paid taxes toward (I feel the same about Passports). Of course, I’ve paid nothing toward the Canadian National Park system, so charge away! They didn’t ask my nationality at the gate.

In order to appreciate parks you have to appreciate parks. It’s about the scenery. It’s about the experience. It’s about the quiet and the beauty and the unusual. This isn’t Disney World (or Disneyland…Canadians can’t seem to keep them straight), it’s mile and miles of mountains, streams, lakes and trees with just occasional interruptions for the town of Banff or the hotel at Lake Louise. In fact, they warn you to keep your car topped off before entering parts of the park because there are no gas stations for long stretches (that’s true out of the park too…we’ll get to that.)

Pretty soon you realize you’re not only driving into the mountains, but up. It’s nothing obvious, but the peaks start to be snowcapped and the temperature starts to drop (I wish cars came with altimeters!). By the time you get to Banff (yes, the town’s inside the park) the temperature had dropped almost ten degrees Celcicus. Nothing was open in Banff except the Tim Horton’s (still looking for batteries), so I had a coffee and apple fritter and pressed on.

The next place to get off and hunt for batteries was Lake Louise. I eventually bought some there at a gas station, and it is better left unsaid what batteries cost in the only place open in the middle of a no-competition zone, but I wanted to take pictures, and the little red battery low symbol was flashing ominously. With what gas cost, I didn’t buy any.

Lake Louise is a glacier-fed wonder. And on that note, we’ll take a break.

We just passed the 23rd anniversary of my flight on NASA’s “Vomit Comet”, the aircraft they use for weightlessness training. That’s a coincidence. About a month ago I was poking around my computer files, which have gotten quite disorganized with years of different work computers, home computers, crashing disks and laptops. I came upon a “contact sheet” of the photos from the flight. Since my budget was limited back then, I had only purchased a print of one of the photos I was in. Since I’d like the others, I emailed the good folks at the Johnson Space Center who are the keepers of the photo library with the photo numbers, and asking what it would cost to get new prints, or high quality digital scans, made. They were in a good mood that day, or are just nice people, because they offered to make the scans for me at no cost. A couple of weeks later, I was able to download them. Thanks! I was willing to pay for the service, but I appreciate the good will.

This is the photo that motivated me. See all the folks in the khaki flight suits? They were most of the Canadian astronauts at that time. I thought it would be fun to hang this photo in my office while I was in Ottawa. The tall guy over my left shoulder is Byron Lichtenberg, Shuttle Payload Specialist and the guy who made it possible for us to get on this flight. He was speaking at Space Camp at one of the Enterprise Team sessions (a group of adults who helped Space camp design and test advanced programs) about his company, which was renting the VC and “subletting” seats for experimenters. We went to him right after the speech and said we had several people ready to go if we could make it work. Since this was a NASA aircraft, we couldn’t just joyride, we had to pass a flight physical, go through low pressure chamber training, and devise experiments for our flights, but eventually we did.

My experiment had to do with the use of a “kneeboard” to use a laptop PC onboard the Shuttle or space station. here I am before I got sick.

Yes, I got sick. The plane lived up to its name. I blame it on the delay on the ground during which I sweated out most of the anti-airsickness drugs :).

In any case, as those of you who have seen me lately know, I look thinner in those photos, because I was! So, I started an exercise program yesterday. Nothing big to start, just some time every day on the treadmill in the apartment building, but that and cutting back on the food a bit will hopefully take me closer to my “flying weight” then I’ve been in a while. It will take time, but I have time.

As I’ve mentioned, we’re less than an hour from the U.S. Border (although on African roads it would be three hours…on a good day). Ogdensburg, NY to be specific. Shortly after you cross the border, there are some railroad tracks…usually empty…but not last Saturday when I was returning from a shopping trip to see these:

These are wind turbine blades, the business end of power generating windmills, and as I was waiting for quite a few of them to pass and let me return to Canada. I was wondering just where they were headed. It is hilly in upstate New York, and we are right along the St. Lawrence River, so there are plenty of opportunities, but I had never seen more than the random individual windmill in the area.

That wasn’t the only reason I set out Monday (three day weekend, you know) to explore a bit up upstate I hadn’t before, east of Ogdensburg, even east of Massena, the next crossing. In fact, all the way to Vermont. If you go to Vermont from way upstate New York, there’s this big body of water in the way – Lake Champlain. Home of Champ, the lake monster. Site of Revolutionary sea battles, and too big to bridge, so I got to take some ferries across the water.

These are not Channel Ferry sized ferries, or even Staten Island sized ferries (although they are bigger than White’s ferry, and much bigger than the one near San Jac in Texas), but they do provide crossings at several points along the lake, and nice views of the shores on a nice day.

Returning from Vermont, I was bouncing along just south of the US Canada border when I found the wind farms. There are several of them along the northernmost stretches of New York State, and I’d guess the load of turbine blades I has seen a few days earlier was headed to one of them. I should have stopped and taken a picture, but I wanted to get home before dark, and I had exceeded my planned trip already taking the ferries to Vermont and driving down to the Dakin Farms store.

That leaves the day between, in which I didn’t travel back to the US but instead stayed in Ottawa and started exploring some of the museums in town. First on my list was the aviation museum. It’s at an airport (not the big one south of town) which is nice because it gives them the opportunity to sell biplane and helicopter rides over the city, which I left for another weekend. I’ll get back to you after a few photos:

That last little piece of nose is all that is left of the Avro Arrow, a Mach 2 interceptor Canada was building in the early 1960s, well ahead of its time. It was eventually cancelled by a government looking to cut budget (and because it was a pet project of the previous government). But not only did they cancel the project, but they ordered the existing aircraft scrapped along with all plans, tooling, etc., which is why all that is left is this bit of the nose.

One of the nice things about Ottawa is that it is a very walkable and bikeable city, which makes it a nice place for a marathon…which is what I kept running into trying to get to the museum. I knew my way there…but the way I knew crossed the marathon route many times (including right in front of my building). I’ve now learned many of the back roads of Ottawa between my apartment and the Rockcliffe Airport.

Finally, the first Friday of each month is Professional Development day in the consular section. We close the windows, catch up on paperwork, and hold some kind of event for team building or to learn more about what we do. For example, In May we went out to the airport and got a tour of the DHS facility out there where they clear people going to the US before they even leave Canada. This month, we broke into teams and went on a scavenger hunt around Ottawa, learning more about the history and geography of the city in which we work and live. It’s an interesting place, and even as the least experienced in the city I was able to pick out a few places from the list others didn’t notice because they’d been here so long. We are in another country, as we are reminded from time to time. Their heroes are the people who fought for the British during our Revolution (and then retreated to Canada).

…if I did it straight through, which I didn’t because I hadn’t warned anyone I was coming, and didn’t want to be sneaking into the House at 2am, but with the three day Victoria Day weekend I decided to go home and see family. Ottawa to Annapolis is about nine hours, but I stopped once for dinner (and gas) and then at about 11pm to spend the night in a cheap hotel and avoid the 2am wakeup for my unsuspecting mother.

Plans are to leave around lunchtime Monday and be back in Ottawa by 10 pm (with a meal and gas stop).

Thanks to President Eisenhower for the Interstate Highway System, an fine example of the good use of government funds to provide infrastructure for the good of the economy and our way of life.

Blogging about my third career, as a Foreign Service Officer (after broadcasting and computers). The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the views of the Embassy, Department of State, or the United States Government.

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